Sky High

This movie is much better than it has any right to be, because
it is completely and utterly predictable. From the point all the
characters are introduced, you or I could have written the
remainder of the movie. Will the high school losers triumph?
Will the beautiful senior inexplicably attracted to the semi-nerd hero
turn out to be not so nice? Will the semi-nerd hero become a jerk, but
then see the error of his ways? Will the school's bad kid be redeemed?
Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

But the script is (actually) clever: the idea is to mash-up
high school teen movie clichés with superhero movie
clichés,
and, on that level, it works just fine.
And the acting is really good.
Kurt Russell
and Kelly Preston
play the superhero parents exactly right: decent, clueless, a tad
egotistical.
Cloris
Leachman,
Bruce Campbell, Kevin McDonald, Dave Foley, and Lynda Carter(!) have
smaller roles, and they're all hilarious. (At one point, Lynda
has the line: "I'm not Wonder Woman, you know." And millions of
middle-aged guys go: "Heh")

Proof

This is kind of a "chick flick" but I liked it quite a bit anyway.
Gwyneth Paltrow plays Catherine, who is beset on all sides by (a)
her crazy, brilliant, recently dead math professor father; (b) her well-meaning
manipulative sister; (c) one of her father's ex-students, who's going
through the great man's notebooks, hoping to tease out some publishable
mathematics from all the insane rambling;
(d) her own self, because she's desperately afraid that
she's as nutty as her dad, and that her brilliant talents might be as
delusional as pop's.

That all sounds kind of dreary, but the movie has quite a bit of humor.
Much of the script involves University faculty and students, and
displays not one whiff of reverence toward them, so that's good too.
In addition to Gwynnie, the first-rate cast includes Anthony Hopkins, Jake
Gyllenhaal, and Hope Davis.

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